Beyond Midnight

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  "That's right. She didn't. And do you know why?"

  Katie started to say something, then stopped. Her mouth was a little open, as if her words were too afraid to make the leap.

  Peaches wanted Katie to come up with the name of Helen Evett on her own. "Katie? You remember," she coaxed.

  Whether Katie remembered or not, she never got the chance to say so, because an ear splitting alarm went off just then on the first floor.

  "A fire!" said Katie, responding to a much more obvious association.

  Who could tell? Peaches had no choice but to grab up Katie and rush her down the stairs to safety. Nine chances out of ten it was a false alarm, but Nat wouldn't want his nanny making that judgment on her own.

  At the door to the kitchen, they discovered the cause: billowing smoke from a pan on the stove, left to burn by the Cook Who Drank.

  Damn!

  Nat had got there first and was pulling the safety on a large fire extinguisher as they watched. Unaware of their presence, he worked quickly to put out the flames, spraying chemical foam over the pan and some nearby newspapers that had also caught fire, not stopping until the extinguisher was emptied.

  After he was done he turned to the cook, who was leaning against the wall, weaving in place and staring at nothing. Peaches wasn't sure the woman even knew there'd been a fire.

  "That's it. You're fired," Nat said with repressed fury. "Get out. Now."

  The smell and the mess were horrendous. The commercial range and the butcher-block counters were covered in sticky white goo. Nat was clearly about to let loose with a stream of invective when he saw his wide-eyed daughter, clinging tightly to her nanny.

  "Katie," he said soothingly. "Isn't this a mess! I guess we won't be eating chicken nuggets for lunch, will we? Maybe we'll just have pizza."

  With impressive sangfroid Katie said, "It isn't even lunchtime."

  Nat threw a deadly look at his retreating, staggering ex-employee and said, "You're absolutely right, punkin. But when it is lunchtime, that's what we'll order."

  He took Katie from Peaches and said apologetically to the nanny, "I hate like h—the dickens to ask you, Peach, but can I beg you to make some kind of pass over this mess? After that, call in some professionals to finish the job."

  "Think nothing of it, Nat," she said reassuringly. "I'll be glad to do it."

  "Thanks. You really are a Peach. And one last thing," he added, lowering his voice. "Make sure she leaves. Pronto."

  "Where is she going?" piped up Katie. Her voice was high and strained, on the way to panic.

  Excellent. Peaches bent her head sideways in a tender way and said with a soft smile, "Shhh. No place very far, honey."

  In a painfully jovial voice Nat said to his daughter, "How about a little horsie ride into Daddy's office? While Daddy works, you can draw or paint or ... something. Whatever. God—the timing!" he moaned, and marched off with Katie on his shoulders.

  The timing stinks, agreed Peaches, surveying the mess.

  ****

  At exactly two o'clock they heard three strong whacks on the brass-ship door knocker.

  Most visitors rang the bell. Peaches, who'd barely had time to peel off her rubber gloves and change back into decent clothing, allowed herself a startled gasp.

  Katie picked up instantly on Peaches's reaction. "What was that?" she asked, staring with big eyes into the hall.

  "I'll get it," said her father quickly. He threw down his newspaper and walked out of the music room, leaving Peaches alone with his daughter.

  "Goodness," she said to Katie when Nat was out of earshot, "that scared me. Who could it be that doesn't ring the doorbell? Someone mysterious, I'm afraid."

  Picking up on the key words, Katie whispered, "Me, too."

  But then she heard her father's voice in the hall, low and friendly and laughing. Something in the sound of it made her face light up. "Mommy's back!" she cried, and scrambled to her feet.

  She hears intimacy, Peaches thought calmly.

  She intercepted the child, then decided to let her run. Katie shot off toward the hall, with Peaches moving swiftly behind her. She was in time to see Katie come to a screeching halt in front of her father and Helen Evett, who was dressed in an amazingly ordinary dress of yellow challis patterned with blue cornflowers.

  Clearly baffled, Katie whirled around to Peaches, then back to her father. Peaches thought she'd want to know where her mommy was, but the child surprised her by not saying anything at all. Instead, she seemed to be studying Helen Evett.

  Helen stooped down to Katie's level; her off-white linen jacket skimmed the antique Persian that carpeted the entry hail. She wore pale stockings and bone shoes, probably Brazilian, certainly not Italian. Peaches was interested, as before, to see that she still wore her wedding band and a small solitaire engagement ring. Her black hair was pulled away from her face and pinned in back; the rest fell straight and loose on her shoulders.

  Plain, plain, plain, despite her good color, thought Peaches. She can't possibly have his attention.

  She certainly had Katie's. The child's hands shot up to the bow in her hair—a band of pink roses on white—as she said, "I'm all dressed up for my tea party."

  "And you look very pretty," said Helen. Her smile took in Peaches, who returned it, but it dwelled on Katie. "Did you pick your clothes out yourself?"

  "Uh-huh. How did you know that?" asked Katie, wondering.

  Because that's what three-year-olds do, thought Peaches, suppressing her irritation behind an amused and loving grin.

  "Well, when my daughter was as old as you, she always wanted to pick her own clothes out."

  "And I can even dress myself," Katie said. She looked up at Peaches. "I can," she insisted. It didn't happen very often; her nanny discouraged such acts of independence.

  "You can do lots of things," Peaches said as she straightened the bow in the child's hair.

  Nat had his hands in his khaki pockets, as if he were strolling among guests at a garden party. Nat being Nat, he should've felt harried and out of place; but he was clearly interested in the way Katie and the preschool director were relating.

  More than that: He was interested in the preschool director herself. Peaches watched as his gaze moved from the top of her head to the hem of her dress, which lay on the carpet in a puddle of cornflowers. He came back to Helen Evett's face, and suddenly Peaches saw what he saw: high cheekbones kissed with natural color, green-gray eyes rimmed in thick lashes, full lips barely touched by lipstick.

  She didn't like what he saw.

  He seemed to have to shake himself loose from his reverie. "Katie and I were just about to have tea," he said with a fond glance at his daughter.

  "Uh-huh," said Katie, nodding her head. "And you could come, too. Okay?"

  Nothing in Peaches's carefully planned campaign had prepared her for the child's about-face. Tea with Helen Evett! The little brat had forgotten everything. And then the morning—wasted. Because of that stupid, damned drunk of a cook.

  "Well, thank you," the Evett woman said to Katie. "I'd be very happy to have tea with you."

  "But we don't know where to have it," Katie said with a fretful sigh. "Daddy says it's too wet outside. And that silly owl is in the tree. What if it could eat up all our cookies?"

  Peaches noted that some of the color drained from Helen Evett's face. Interesting: Suddenly she wasn't quite so pretty. The nanny smiled; a little makeup would've prevented all that.

  ****

  "An owl?"

  Helen's heart took a dive at the mention of the word. She hadn't thought about the owl since the day Linda Byrne died; but the owl and the death were entwined in her memory, and the memory was disturbing.

  "Uh-huh. It lives in our tree. And it eats all the mouses."

  "My goodness!" Helen said to cover the faintness she felt. "And does it say 'who, who'?"

  Katie shook her head. "But sometimes it sneezes."

  Nat smiled and said, "Our neighbors have
a potting shed filled with sacks of birdseed. The shed's not tight; every mouse in the county has figured it out. In the meantime the owl's figured out about the mice."

  "I thought owls hunted at night," Peaches remarked.

  Nat shrugged. "Not this one. Well, where do we set the table, Katie-kins? Music room or your room?"

  Katie clasped her hands together and lifted them over her head. "Mine!" she said, reaching a decision at last.

  "Yours it is, then," her father said solemnly, extending his hand to her.

  Katie and her father led the way; Helen fell in behind with Peaches. The nanny, who'd taken Helen's purse and jacket, was going on in a pleasant way about a Monet painting that hung in a lighted alcove at the foot of the grand staircase, but Helen wasn't hearing much of what she said. Her attention was focused on two things: father and daughter.

  Her emotions, already wound tight before she got there, had corkscrewed still further when Nat had answered the door instead of Peaches. Had he any reason to do it besides laughing off the grease fire earlier? Or was Helen looking for meaning where there was none? He'd greeted her warmly; but then that was his way.

  And the owl. What was that all about? Was it the association with Linda Byrne's death that had set Helen's heart thundering? And yet Katie didn't seem to be afraid of either the owl or Helen right now. So maybe none of it meant anything.

  Helen tried to erase her mind of preconceptions and simply enjoy the moment. By now she'd given up trying to fight the deep, deep sense of attraction she was feeling for Nat. Appropriate, inappropriate—it really didn't matter. She could hide it, but she couldn't deny it.

  In the meantime, Katie had taken it upon herself to explain the floor plan. "And this is Peaches's room and that's my room and over there is Daddy's room. It's all different now," she added.

  For one brief second Helen saw a kind of haziness appear in the child's face, as if she were losing focus. Then she snapped out of it with the same kind of determination that an elderly woman uses when she speaks of offspring that have passed on before her.

  It was a remarkable feat for a three-year-old. It's because she's so excited to have someone new to play with. But we're not enough; she needs playmates her own age. The sooner Katie began at the preschool, the better.

  They all filed into the nursery, which Nat explained had been converted from the master bedroom, and Katie conducted a personal tour for Helen's benefit.

  "These are my clothes," she said, dragging Helen over to the first door, which led to a dressing room walled on one side with painted white bureaus and lined on the opposite side with enough racks of clothing to stock a fair-sized Baby Gap store.

  "And this is my bafroom," Katie said, rushing off to the second door. The walls of that room were charmingly hand-painted with images of Snow White, her seven pals, and—not surprisingly—no witch. A red step stool with the name "Katherine" in blue letters on it was pulled up to a porcelain basin imprinted with trumpet vines and hummingbirds. A slew of toothbrushes in every known color and cartoon character jammed a bright plastic holder alongside. The towels, red and yellow and blue, were all embroidered with the name "Katie."

  Who had bathrooms like that besides royalty?

  A third door led to a small library—"small," as compared to, say, the New York Library. Helen couldn't believe it. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of books, many of them out-of-print collector's items, lining three walls of shelves. Arranged on top of the low wrap-around bookcases was a staggering collection of stuffed animals, all of them with hopeful expressions on their faces. Take me, hold me, love me, they begged.

  One little girl. All those toys. It couldn't be done.

  "I will set the table now," said Katie, finished with the tour. "You can wait right here. Okay?" She turned to her nanny and said in a stage whisper, "Peaches, you help me," and hauled her by the hand into the nursery proper.

  That left Nat and Helen surrounded by a hundred pairs of prying stuffed-animal eyes.

  "Well! This is really ... something," said Helen, not having any idea what to say about the almost mindless ostentation. There was something not right about it. The place looked like a toy warehouse.

  She couldn't keep herself from murmuring, "You spoil her."

  "I can afford to," Nat said without taking offense.

  "You can't afford to. That's just it." God, she was lecturing. She didn't want to lecture. She tweaked the ear of a four-foot stuffed panda that filled a tufted spoonback chair and said, "Polly Panda, I presume?"

  "You've met?" he asked, smiling.

  Helen remembered too late that the toy was somehow tied in with an angry outburst by Linda Byrne. "Katie did mention her."

  "It was a bribe," Nat admitted, "pure and simple. I missed Katie's third birthday. I was in Phoenix, checking out a pipe manufacturing company, and I brought back the biggest thing I could find, thinking it would look like the biggest apology I could offer. Didn't work."

  "Ah. So this would be—?" Helen asked, tickling the neck of a six-foot giraffe.

  "A cancelled trip to Busch Gardens. But Katie was really too young then, anyway."

  "And this?" She stroked the soft, fuzzy ear of a bunny the size of Harvey.

  He sighed. "Easter. Who celebrates Easter anymore?"

  On a hunch, Helen went up to an incredibly dumb looking Santa Claus that had flopped over on its nose. "Surely you didn't miss—?"

  "Can you believe it? I got snowed in on Christmas Eve in Denver. That was the old airport, though. It wouldn't happen now."

  She shook her head. "It's a regular rogues' gallery, isn't it?"

  "I'm the damn rogue. I know it." He sat the Santa back up, muttering, "But it's not as if she cared."

  Something in his voice made Helen say, "Who, Katie?"

  He clenched his jaw, then answered, "No. Not Katie."

  Linda Byrne. He did know about his wife's affair, then. Helen felt her cheeks flooding with color. Obviously he'd just figured out from her question that she knew about it, too.

  The brutal silence felt downright bizarre as they stood there surrounded by soft fuzzy creatures and waited to be summoned to tea.

  "So many books!" Helen said, searching for a subject. She laughed and added, "Have you considered opening a preschool of your own?"

  "It may come to that," he said in his new dark mood. "Unless we can figure out what the hell is bugging my daughter."

  "I know what you're saying, Nat," she responded, seriously now. "But Katie seems fine with me so far."

  "Yes. But she runs hot and cold."

  And you don't?

  Helen said quietly, "Has she been any more explicit about her fears?"

  "No. Only that she's afraid of your office, as I told you. She goes on and on about 'that room we were in.'"

  "That's so odd. But nothing else?"

  "A little while ago she asked me, 'What if the preschool gets on fire, Daddy?'"

  "That's understandable," Helen said thoughtfully, "after the fire in your kitchen."

  "I guess." He seemed to scowl at the memory of the morning. "I don't know why I ever let the woman stay on as long as I did. Peaches pointed out that we don't need a cook. She can fix Katie's meals; and as for me, I'd prefer to grab something on the run—"

  "Oh-ka-a-ay," sang Katie. "You can come out now."

  "Shall we?" he asked, offering Helen his arm.

  Smiling, she fell in with his whimsy and laid her hand on his forearm. He was wearing a long-sleeved polo shirt of a soft rose color, a surprisingly gentle choice for a man with a black Porsche.

  For Katie's tea party, Helen decided. She liked him the more for it. His forearm felt sinewy to her touch; she decided that he chopped his own wood, after all. She tried not to think any further about it than that.

  They arrived at the table, a sturdy little affair with a varnished top around which three fifteen-inch-high chairs had been arranged. Bright plastic cups and dishes had been set out on the tabletop, and a little white te
apot. A plate of very edible chocolate chip cookies lay in the middle. A plastic crystal vase with plastic flowers supplied the necessary touch of elegance.

  Katie sat down and said excitedly, "You sit here, Daddy. And you may sit here," she said to Helen, pointing to the other empty chair.

  And Peaches? Once Katie got everyone in place, the nanny smiled and said to Nat, "I'll be in my room if you need me."

  It could have been awkward, but it was not. Peaches had a way of putting everyone at ease. No wonder Nat relied so much on her.

  She left and suddenly Helen wished she'd stay. What if Katie became frightened of Helen without her nanny close by, and went screaming off to find her? Helen would die of humiliation.

  But as it turned out, Helen had no need to worry. Katie was on her own turf and in her element. She was chatty, animated, eager to please. Even Helen, who got along exceptionally well with children, was surprised at how simpatico they were.

  It turned out that they liked the same colors, the same Sesame Street characters, the same Raffi songs. They even both knew Barney! Before the cookies were half eaten and the teapot emptied of its lemonade, Katie and Helen were like old friends.

  When the cookies were done Katie jumped up from her chair. She went around the table to Helen and put her hands on Helen's cheeks, forcing Helen to focus directly on her.

  "I will bring you something orange, okay?" Katie said, her eyes huge with excitement.

  Helen laughed and said, "Okay," and off the child went, returning from her reading room with a Zoe doll. Daddy, whose back was killing him anyway, got bumped from the toy chair to make room for the Sesame Street moppet. He went off to fetch the spoonback chair from the reading room.

  Back to Helen Katie went, pressing the palms of her hands to Helen's face again. Look at me, her gesture said. Please, please, pay attention to me.

  "I will bring you something liddle, okay?"

  Off she went again. This time she brought back a tiny worry-doll, one inch high. Helen looked at Nat, who shrugged and said, "Airport. Guatemala."